Actually you are completely wrong on that. All leagues go through an expansion bid process. It didn't take me long to google the proof of it. The baseball expansion you mentioned above had several other candidates including Buffalo, Washington, Orlando and Mexico City.

That was the very first thing that popped up on Google. Now if I had a couple of hours, I could probably go through and get every failed expansion bid from every expansion in every league.

You found the teams that missed the cut on the expansion I said was open and actually had an open process. Congratulations. (In fact, the first eight are from the expansions I said were open processes).

MLB announced an expansion committee in 1994, and did so loudly to get Florida Congressmen to back off. Tampa was jerked around three times and their politicians decided to go after MLB's anti-trust exemption.

The MLB expansion committee featured:
-- Tampa native resident George Steinbrenner.
-- Key West resident Richard Jacobs.
-- An owner who nearly moved his team to Tampa (Jerry Reinsdorf)
-- An owner who owned an NBA team and was friends with the NBA owner who applied for the Phoenix team (also Jerry Reinsdorf)
-- An exec who worked in the NBA for decades and knew the NBA owner who applied for the Phoenix team (Stan Kasten)

The application process was solely collecting future data. EVERYONE knew who was getting those two franchises. This is the from the day the committee was announced (The New York Times, March 02, 1994)

Quote:

Further evidence that Phoenix and St. Petersburg-Tampa, Fla., will receive franchises when major league baseball next expands came today with the appointment of six owners to an expansion committee.